from the you're-a-sport-now dept

The other day, Tim Cushing wrote about Nintendo's odd move of pulling its fighting title Smash Bros. from the internet stream of the Evolution Championship Series, before then walking back the request and allowing it after all. In that post, he noted that Nintendo appeared to be concerned, wrongly, that a stream of its game being played would somehow harm its brand, and that it was fan reaction to the move that caused its flip-flop. That all may indeed be true, but it turns out it wasn't the whole story.

Evo co-founder Joey Cuellar has revealed that Nintendo didn't just want to stop Smash Bros. Melee being streamed from this year's fighting game competition, they wanted to stop that part of the tournament taking place altogether.

"They were not only trying to shut down the stream", he told OneMoreGameTV, "they were trying to shut down the event, the Smash portion of the event".

That is even more insane. It isn't often you can take any real life lessons from the world of professional sports, but Nintendo might as well realize something: it's in the professional sports business now. Tangentially, sure, but it's in it. EVO is but one example of professional gaming competitions. The trends seem to suggest that the world of pro-gaming competitions, leagues, and tournaments is only going to grow, perhaps even exponentially. And if that trend does indeed play out, Nintendo better take a page from professional sports leagues and encourage the playing of its games, rather than trying to shut it all down.

There's a reason why Major League Baseball puts such an emphasis on building baseball fields throughout the country. The NFL knows what they're doing when they make sure they have a stake in Pop Warner football. The NBA has its players going not only around the country, but around the world to host basketball clinics. More people playing your game is good for your game. Good for breeding better players, for growing markets, and good for generating interest generally in the game itself.

If Nintendo was smart, it might consider market-testing its own gaming "stadiums" or competition centers, building upon the interest to promote its own games and encouraging others to do likewise. Trying to shut down the tournament? That's just stupid.

Their argument seems to boil down to this: Nintendo asserts it has the right not to let you play its games.

Someone really needs to take a rolled-up newspaper to Nintendo of America.

And that's before you take your excellent points about the impact on Nintendo into consideration, the fact that the very last thing gaming companies should be doing is trying to prevent people from playing their games.

Re:

Re:

If we learned anything from the gaming industry's bizarre fetish for DRM and general control over "their" products after sale, they are not too concerned about their customers playing and enjoying the products they bought, but rather the whole paying bit. Preferebly over and over and over again.

Nintendo wants a placid, tame userbase that accepts whatever Nintendo puts out without (too much) criticism. Nintendo wants a consumer base that accepts the proclamations from Redmond/Tokyo/etc. as gospel and never questions a single decision from the company. Nintendo wants a fanbase that allows Nintendo to control every aspect of its IP without so much as a whisper of dissent.

Nintendo doesn't seem to want people to play its games in any way other than how Nintendo wants them to play it. A fair number of Smash Bros. fans accused Nintendo of trying to alienate the competitive Smash Bros. scene with Brawl via its ‘tripping’ mechanism; Melee remains the popular choice for competitive play primarily for that reason.

Nintendo doesn’t seem to want people questioning the decisions it makes for the directions of its IP. The company all but brushed off the criticism of Metroid: Other M in regards to the characterization of Samus Aran and implied that gamers didn’t understand what the game’s director wanted to accomplish.

The EVO debacle seems to imply that Nintendo doesn’t want the Smash Bros. IP associated with the Fighting Game Community or perhaps even considered a fighting game IP. That it seems to want this despite Melee beating out more recent and more popular games (including indie darling Skullgirls) in the EVO fundraiser to earn the ninth tournament slot for the event speaks volumes about the attitude Nintendo has towards it consumers.

But it also speaks to the mindset of the company in general. For too long, Nintendo has refused to evolve a number of its IPs in any significant manner (hi Zelda), release new games in older-but-still-loved IPs (hi StarFox), and stop force-feeding specific IPs down gamers’ throats (hi Mario).

On top of that, the company seems to have only its own interests in mind when designing consoles. When the industry began moving towards CD-ROMs (a move designed as much with consumers’ wallets and storage spaces in mind as the costs of game creation and distribution), Nintendo stayed with proprietary cartridges (N64). When the industry moved to DVDs, Nintendo used a proprietary format (Gamecube). When consoles began using onboard hard drives to store game saves and downloadable content, Nintendo half-assed the concept by including far less space on the Wii than even the lowest-end models of the PS3 and the XBox 360 carried.

When online play became the norm in the industry, Nintendo refused to make a leap into the online market — and when it made the leap (with the Wii), it did so in a boneheaded fashion that looked wholly out of touch regarding how consumers perceived online gaming.

And that, right now, has become Nintendo’s true legacy: despite all the success it had with the Wii and all the success it had in the pre-PlayStation era of gaming, Nintendo has fallen out of touch with what the average ‘modern gamer’ wants out of videogames and looks damn near ‘backwards’ in the eyes of said gamers. Even longtime Nintendo fans (such as myself) don’t have the patience or willpower to defend moves such as the Let’s Play and EVO debacles any more.

Nintendo, through years of ignoring consumers and focusing on controlling its own image, has become a company that sits woefully out of touch with the gaming community at large. It has lost an immeasurable amount of goodwill with gamers, and when it makes dumb decisions such as the EVO debacle, it loses that much more.

Nintendo must change its mindset and ‘catch up’ with the rest of the industry or it’ll eventually suffer the same fate as the companies it crushed back before Sony pushed out the PlayStation One.

After all: SEGA may have had its die-hard fans, but even they couldn’t save the Dreamcast.

Re:

For those who didn't understand the situation, there's a cultural explanation: Nintendo is a Japanese company and Japanese doesn't like spoilers and normally Japanese company does anything in their power to remove them from the internet in Japan, including video.

Re: Re: Re:

Re:

So... Nintendo is acting like the **IA's we're so used to seeing in Techdirt being so afraid of technology changing their business that they're forced to move with the times the same way a dog on a leash is dragged along when it doesn't want to go anywhere?

Re:

"Nintendo must change its mindset and ‘catch up’ with the rest of the industry or it’ll eventually suffer the same fate as the companies it crushed back before Sony pushed out the PlayStation One."

Considering they use the same CPU as IBM's Wattson, that their WiiU that the games that use the screen controller are cross platform between ARM and PowerPC, that they have a very short, very wide system bus between CPU and GPU and use ESRAM for VRAM and System RAM separately, and your old Virtual Console Games from the Wii now play in 1080p thus making the old N64 games look less jagged...due to antialiasing, and due to the fact that they are still the only console that currently uses 1GB of VRAM and a separate 512MB of RAM for the OS.. I'd say their ahead.

Re: Re:

Considering that they still haven't grasped online play, have a console that's underpowered compared to the upcoming consoles from both Sony and Microsoft, have a console that's underwhelming in its appeal and sales and still rely heavily on franchises rather than quality new titles, they have a lot to learn. Both EA and Ubisoft have recently announced that they're scaling back support, which doesn't bode well.

I've got nothing against Nintendo, but if you have to grasp at upgraded retro games and tech that's largely outclassed by existing (if not currently released) tech from competitors, you're not defending them very well. They do a lot of great things, but are missing the things that attract big sales right now.

Time will tell, but they do risk going the way of Sega unless they can get their act together (in the home anyway, the 3DS is doing extremely well with little real competition from Sony).

Re: Re: Re:

That. Wii is basically 2 Game Cubes glued together (metaphorically speaking) and is greatly outperformed by the competition. The innovation of the motion thing that grabbed a lot of families is now fairly understood and will be addressed more than properly by the next generation consoles thus depriving Nintendo of the competitive advantage Wii enjoyed.

I personally bought an Wii and it's an incredibly group entertainment machine. The diversity of games however is limited to variations of the same formula over and over. There are good games for it? Sure. But it got tired pretty fast. My Xbox has like a fraction of the titles I got for Wii and I play it much more.

Re: Re: Re: Re:

That doesn't mean much. The game industry usually goes to the cheapest system with the largest fanbase. The Nintendo, Super NES, Playstation, PS2, and Wii kind of show that we shouldn't look at hardware specs to see what people want.

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:

The Nintendo, Super NES, Playstation, PS2, and Wii kind of show that we shouldn't look at hardware specs to see what people want.

I know every time I've bought a game console, I've never looked at the hardware specs at all. They're irrelevant to me. What I look for is the existence of good games. And, truthfully, the games that need really good hardware are usually not the good games.

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:

I agree. That's why I'm questioning how Nintendo will fare they managed to sell shitloads due to the motion system inovation. You know what virtually all of the people I have contact with want now for entertainment? Xbox. Because of knect. And Xbox is at least 20% more expensive than Wii. And personally M$ system has much more potential for tons of fun than Nintendo's system.

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:

You know what virtually all of the people I have contact with want now for entertainment? Xbox. Because of knect.

We have opposite friends! Virtually all the people I know who want a new console do not want the XBox. The kinect is not a selling point for them, and the xbox is a bit pricy -- not just in terms of the initial cost, but the ongoing costs.

Re: Re:

I'm not sure what's more ludicrous, that you're arguing the WiiU has more advanced internal hardware than the other consoles or that having more advanced internal hardware in the console means they're 'ahead' in the context provided.

Re:

Yeah, if anything, Nintendo may have wanted to avoid having the Smash Bros. IP associated with the Fighting Game Community at large due to the racism, sexism, and sexual prejudice that appears to run rampant and unchecked within the FGC (which, when you think about it, comes off as reasonable).

But even if it did want to disassociated Smash Bros. with the FGC, it chose the worst way possible to try.

Re: Re: Re:

I understand fully if they don't want to play the newest game though.

For comparison, the newest Smash Bros game is kind of like a fighting game if it randomly wrestled away the controls for you every twenty seconds if you happened to be playing too well. Gameplay wise, it is akin to a staring contest where the loser is the first person to move more than a foot away from his starting position. It is in every sense of the word, broken balance wise. (Not that Smash wasn't already a pretty broken game to begin with)

Either ways it's still a boneheaded move on Nintendo's part if they wanted to goad people into playing the new game. The correct action would be to pay the players to stream their new game instead of trying to force them to with lawyers.

Re: Re: Re: Re:

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:

It’s actually kind of the point.

Nintendo designed SSB so that anyone could theoretically win with any given character based more on luck than skill. You could consider some characters ‘overpowered’, but Nintendo tries to ‘balance’ that with the whole ‘tripping’ mechanism.

As I said above, Nintendo doesn’t want people to consider SSB as a fighting game franchise. To that end, Nintendo doesn’t necessarily do the sort of balancing and tweaking to power levels and movesets that a company such as Capcom would do with the average Street Fighter game — and Nintendo sure as hell wouldn’t listen to fans if they decided to do actual balancing, anyway, because what the hell do the fans know amirite?

If Nintendo was smart, it might consider market-testing its own gaming "stadiums" or competition centers, building upon the interest to promote its own games and encouraging others to do likewise. Trying to shut down the tournament? That's just stupid.

Well, we are talking about the people who added a game mechanic where you randomly trip and fall, specifically because they wanted people to win at random instead of based on player skill.
I can just imagine the line of thought involved in that decision. "No, you can't play Smash Bros at that event, because it's an event for fighting games. Smash Bros is NOT a fighting game, it's a party game!"

Re:

That's what most of the fighting game community says every year, actually. They keep it around because it makes the most money out of any single EVO game. It is their money maker even though no one really cares for it.

Re:

The NES sold well because it wasn't marketed as a home computer console. The reason the grey front loading NES looks the way it does is because it was the "top loading consoles" if that time that caused the crash here.

It provided a seal of quality because it restricted third parties from developing and releasing more than one game per year. Dick move...yes....did it work...yes.

Konami owned Ultra and various other companies created subsidiaries to get around it.

Nintendo has and probably will always be an ultra conservative company. Being the only company still using region locks and their recent strides in trying to command control of their IP on the internet is just a bad sign of Ninty just refusing to modernize while it's competitors are doing the opposite and encouraging sharing and streaming of their own games.